Williams College plan to demolish former home of Dagmar Bubriski leaves some ‘shocked, outraged’

“She would have been horrified it ended this way.”

That’s how Charles Bonenti described how the late Dagmar Bubriski, his former colleague on the Williamstown Historical Commission, would react if she knew her 19th-century home at 42 Hoxsey St. may well be torn down at the behest of its present owner, Williams College — the very entity she had refused to sell the home to during her lifetime.

Dagmar’s daughter, Wanda Bubriski, said she knows the college’s interest in buying the property had gone on for more than 50 years.

But Wanda didn’t expect the college would tear it down — even though her mother did.

“That’s why she stayed in the house,” Wanda said. “Because she knew if she moved, [the college] would demolish it.”

Dagmar and her husband Stanley moved into the home in 1954.

After Stanley died in 1965, Dagmar raised four children in the home.

An informed crusader on civic issues, Dagmar was also a perennial face in the audience at selectmen’s meetings and a frequent letter-writer to the North Adams Transcript regarding a wide range of Williamstown issues.

An advocate for historic preservation, Dagmar helped lead ultimately unsuccessful fights to preserve the Williamstown Opera House and various other properties owned by Williams College, according to her obituary in The Eagle.

Hemmed in by the college’s Bronfman Science Center following the center’s initial construction in the 1960s, Dagmar’s own home motivated her historic preservation efforts.

The taller, 90,000-square-foot brick science center is set to be demolished this year to make room for an updated science complex. It looms over the yellow Victorian that Dagmar called home.

“This is just one more step in the institutionalization of the village center,” said Bonenti.

Indeed. The College has always been the most important institution in Williamstown, but its power, relative to town residents, seems to grow stronger each year.

The college’s expansion also undermines the town’s architectural diversity, he said.

Buildings that were homes like Dagmar’s are being overshadowed by the college’s new buildings — largely “institutional, bland, generic boxes,” he said.

“Williamstown has become a series of construction sites for massive building,” said Peter Bubriski, one of Wanda’s three brothers, of the college’s expansion efforts. “And I won’t even go into the really sad state of their architectural choices.”

For years, Hoxsey Street was a residential neighborhood filled with family homes like the one Peter grew up in, he recalled.

Now, it’s been taken over for the college’s needs, he said.

Besides the Bubriskis’ former home, the college owns five other buildings on Hoxsey Street — two faculty-staff rentals, two student residences and one building that houses academic offices that will be converted into another faculty-staff rental, said Jim Kolesar, assistant to the president for community and government affairs at Williams College.

Presumably, Kolesar (rather than Jim Reische) got involved in this article because he had been sparing with Dagmar for years.

I have no problem with the College owning lots of buildings. Indeed, I think we need more home-like structures so that we can dramatically increase the number of co-ops. But it is absurd how many rentals the College maintains for staff and faculty. What a waste of resources! The College needs to house students. It does not need to house faculty/staff.

The college also owns and maintains more than 75 buildings in town that are at least 100 years old, Kolesar said.

“The college has torn down a number of structures,” said Andrew Groff, community development director for Williamstown. “But I would not characterize them as being a poor steward” of historic buildings. The college has invested in historic rehabilitation of buildings, he said.

When Wanda sold the house to Williams College in 2017, the college told her it would be used for office space during construction and later for faculty housing, she said.

“I thought, ‘Oh, great!'” she said. “”That is just wonderful.'”

She said she now believes the college was simply telling her that so she would sell.

D’uh! Of course the College was telling her whatever she wanted to hear.

But, that said, Wanda could have driven a harder bargain, could have inserted a provision that the College could not tear down the house for 100 years. She choose not to do that, probably because it would have lowered the price she and her brothers received.

I wonder if Dagmar thought about including a relevant stipulation in her will . . .

Kolesar said the college intended to use the house for those purposes.

“The college looked forward to having that as a faculty-staff rental,” he said. “[But] it really had to be vacated.”

After efforts to move the home failed to pan out earlier this year, the college now plans to demolish the building.

In a letter sent March 12, Wanda, her brothers and about 97 other people signed a letter to the president and trustees of Williams College and the Williamstown Historical Commission urging the college to reconsider its decision to tear the building down.

“We are shocked, outraged and saddened to hear of the decision of Williams College to tear down the house at 42 Hoxsey Street,” the letter states. “It was the home of Dagmar Bubriski, a community leader, columnist, a radio host and a widow at 37 who raised a family of four while being the loudest cheerleader and staunchest defender of Williamstown historic and cultural preservation. This history deserves to be preserved.”

Does the College archive the letters it receives? I hope so. Better yet would be to scan them and make them (or most of them) public.

On April 12, the town’s Historical Commission will take up the matter. The commission has the power to delay the demolition for up to a year. If the commission chooses not to delay, the demolition could go forward right away.

Removing the building will facilitate the construction of a new science center building — a core educational priority for the college, according to a Jan. 31 letter from the college’s lawyer to William Barkin, chairman of the Williamstown Historical Commission. Removal will also allow the college to enhance the landscape along Hoxsey Street with more plantings and a geologic rain garden.

It will also enable the college to improve underground utility and stormwater management and relocate a small parking lot to a location that will be more sensitive to the college’s neighbors, according to the letter.

“These decisions have to be made all the time,” Kolesar said in an email. “Once all those [considerations] were weighed, the decision was, it needs to be removed.”

Over the last four years, the college has moved two houses and a barn, facilitated the moving of a third house and has taken down four, Kolesar said.

The college listed the property as available throughout January and February, seeking parties interested in moving the building off the current lot, Kolesar said.

The building was free, with the interested party taking on the cost of moving the home.

The offer expired Feb. 28.

The college received about 17 expressions of interest, Kolesar said.

He recalled there was an entity that was “very serious” about the project, but ultimately backed out.

“In the end, they felt that they couldn’t pull it off,” he said.

Perhaps they could put up a plaque to commemorate Dagmar and her defense of town against gown over the years?

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8 Responses to “You Can’t Fight Williams College”

anonymous says:

I live in Williamstown. It is true that you can’t fight Williams College. The character of the town is being slowly destroyed with no end in sight. And they have no long range plan in place. It’s like a metastasizing cancer.

Doesn’t Williams have a duty to preserve historical property? Poor Jim Kolesar. He seems like a nice guy, and so earnest. It must be getting hard for him to look in the mirror the way he lies and lies and lies.

Not to mention how unattractive the new buildings are.

62 Center-fugly

Garage behind 62 Center-fugly and empty pretty much always (why?)

New admin buildings- fugly and have destroyed campus sightlines

New athletic building at football field – destroys mountain view

Paresky Center-fugly

Bookstore-fugly on steroids and emptier than the empty parking garage.

Faculty Housing Ghetto on Pine Cobble- composed of many empty and fugly pre-fabbed, aluminum sided houses, carved into the side of the mountain causing environmental travesty (hello Hank Art? Where were you on this one?)

Taconic Golf course- how many 100’s of trees were cut down there a few years ago??? Hank Art? hello?

Garfield is about to come down. Have you seen the designs to replace it?

What are the plans for the old Williams Inn building?

We are re-routing a river in order to build a hotel – sounds like a bad line from an Al Gore movie. But on the other hand- there will be no plastic bottles at the graduation ceremony, thank God.

My hand is getting tired typing. Williams owns hundreds of acres of open space. Why must so much be torn down?

So what is happening? Prior generations of Williams administrators were long-termers who lived in the town and who cared. The current crew has no historical ties to the college, i.e. Fred Puddester and Rita Coppola-Wallace. They are corporate. They don’t care. They won’t stay. And Fred’s wife is on the town planning committee! LOL. (Just for the fun of it, google Rita Coppola-Wallace – interesting federal criminal probe history re: city of Springfield involving her position as a public employee and enrichment of her builder husband)

The college has to spend a certain amount of endowment on capital improvements or get taxed. That is the issue.

Berkshire county is increasingly depressed economically. Williamstown knows it is technically West North Adams without Williams. There you have it.

I certainly agree that most of the new designs are extraordinarily bland but that is almost a requirement to achieve Gold/Platinum LEED status so who do you want to answer to-the politically correct enviro-nazis or plans with a greater degree of architectural beauty and craftsmanship? It seems you can’t have both so you end up with me-too buildings that might fit in well in southern california (lower case insult intentional).

I lived in one of those 100 year old plus college faculty rentals for about three years. It was on Southworth Street. As a native Californian, I grew up in a fresh, brand new home built in the 1960s. I wasn’t prepared for life in a college rental.

I remember the first time I went into the basement of the Southworth Street house to do laundry for the first time. There were electrical cords, hanging on nails, strung among the rafters. I felt like I was living in a dank, antiquated fire trap. I spent my first few days trying to chase a bat out of the place. In the winter, the steam heated pipes clanked so loud that I thought they were broken.

I wasn’t a fan of college rental properties. As far as I’m concerned they can all be torn down for the sake of humanity.

I also agree that much of the new construction feels less than uniquely williams in a way that is a loss. Individually, some of the buildings are quite nice, but when I was on campus recently, it felt more like any other college architecturally than it had before. I hadn’t thought LEED might be a cause. I could see how it can be, but would like more knowledgeable sources to confirm/describe exactly how that is the case/if there’s an alternative possible.

anonymous: Wow do we agree. For what it’s worth, all these buildings are just as antiseptic and terrible from the inside:

62 Center: Totally out of place, violates all rules of scale, and alienated from the surrounding environment.

Garage behind 62 Center: Designed to handle parking for high-capacity events that happen primarily during the theater festival (?), otherwise an empty drab brick appendix to campus that feels like a strange curiosity.

Bookstore: Hard to believe that this was constructed on purpose. Aggressively asymmetrical facade balanced by completely fluorescent and bland office-space interior. Place seems embarrassed to be peddling books and fronts Williams apparel tastelessly.

New Library: Again, books are an embarrassment and stashed in compact shelves (heaven help if you if you want to browse one isle while somebody is in an adjacent isle). Open construction means you can hear someone drop a pencil from floors below. Events held on the ground floor disturb students throughout the building.

Every American school I’ve ever been at is now 20+ years into a sustained construction boom. Everywhere I’ve seen this, the apparently endless building manages to disrupt life on campus and in the surrounding communities, always in new and ever changing ways; to produce new buildings that, regardless of the context or surrounding architecture, fall into the same now-universal ‘campus drab’ aesthetic; and to remain steadily orthogonal to the core functions of the institution. (Actually important and necessary construction projects having been handled decades ago.)

I’m willing to accept that LEED credits are part of the explanation. Can they be the whole of it? My feeling is that colleges like Williams truly can’t stop building. It’s like a metabolic process, a byproduct of deeper institutional forces that I’ve not ever seen fully explained, but that is part and parcel of other problems, like the administrative bloat and forever increasing tuition.